Breaking Point
by tepid sponge bath
Summary: Sherlock never seems to appreciate anything Molly does for him.  And she will not take it lying down anymore.  Rated for the swearing.


**Disclaimer: **The characters of _Sherlock _are not mine, nor is the story, nor are the characters from the original stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. I make no monetary profit from this.

**Note:**__Written for the sherlockbbc_fic kink meme, for this prompt here: _Molly's been more than patient with a rather giddy-frantic Sherlock who is using the morgue almost daily. One day, Molly gets a a call from her doctor informing her of some bad news health-wise. She's been holding her feelings at bay all say. Then, sherlock flounces in and makes some biting remark about her.___

_Molly lets loose. She tells Sherlock how much he hurts her, how she feels worthless in his presence, how she is smart...and then she lets slip that something is wrong and how scared she is. She's about to leave in a devestated mess when sherlock stops her._

I seem to have great, unrealized sympathy for Molly Hooper.

**Breaking Point**

Molly is a patient soul. She likes her job, and if some people find it incongruous that a sweet, kitten-loving thing like her found her niche dissecting dead bodies, well, she pays them no mind. She is good at what she does, even at the chemical tests she found so baffling at first - chemistry is not her strong suit, and she learned what she had to do by rote, followed by painstaking research to make sure she_understood_ why things changed color, why things looked like that under a microscope, what things would look like when they went wrong. She is thorough like that, and methodological, and sensible. She has been what she thinks of as a good girl all her life, only ever having put a fraction of a toe out of line _once_, at uni, when just you had to do _something_ crazy and impractical and slightly illegal, otherwise you wouldn't be human. (She still blushes when she remembers.)

Her friends call her "Little Miss Perfect" to her face, and she doesn't really mind. They don't mean anything bad by it.

And then she meets _him_ and sensible, competent, smart Molly is replaced by a shaking puddle of nervous ineptitude who can't even _talk_properly. It's electric. It's wonderful. She's had crushes before, but never like this, never debilitating, never so _consuming_. She thinks of him constantly, maybe obsessively, and the only part of it that she minds is that she turns into a complete mouse whenever he's around, and can't even manage a proper sentence. She wonders what he thinks of her.

She writes about him in her blog, taking care to not mention him by name, even if it is flipping obvious.

He asks for favors sometimes, tall orders, usually (body parts from the morgue and chemicals from the lab as if they were just takeaway dinners, access to cadavers, that sort of thing), and she grants them, hoping that he'll appreciate it, and that he won't notice how she blushes. (An impossibility - he notices _everything_.)

She knows she isn't doing herself any favors. That was why she hooked up with Jim from IT. And that had been sweet, and she had giggled helplessly over how they _flirted_ in the comments of her blog, and then _he_ had gone and spoiled it by pointing out how _obvious_ it was that Jim was gay.

She had almost gotten angry then. She hated getting angry. It was uncomfortable, and when she got angry she didn't know how to stop, so she didn't let herself become angry if she could help it.

And then she had argued with Jim (because _he_ had said so!) and he had disappeared on her, and it turned out that he was this master criminal who was responsible for all the bombs and things and kidnapping John and almost killing Sh..._him_.

It had hurt. Oh, it had _hurt_, and what made it worse was that she felt she was guilty too, that she had played some little part in those people dying, in _him_ being put in terrible, terrible danger.

If he noticed how much quicker she agrees to let him have whatever baffling thing he wanted after that awful incident at the pool, he never remarks on it.

He does say 'thank you' though. He always has - he can be polite in his way, if not exactly nice.

He's been particularly demanding these past few days. There was a case, an important one, lives were at stake, the government was involved somehow, and Jim (she still can't think of him as _Moriarty_) had something to do with it too. So _he_ had been flitting in and out of the lab and the morgue, coming and going at all hours. Molly was used to an erratic schedule - she sometimes spent nights at Bart's if necessary, but even she had to admit that _him_ calling in the middle of the night just when she'd gone to sleep to ask that he have access to propionic acid and Coomassie blue G-350 _now_ was a bit much.

Not that she said anything, of course. She is much too infatuated, and with guilt added to the mix, it's hopeless. She had agreed to meet him at Bart's in fifteen minutes.

That had been last night, and she sits at her little desk this morning with an awful headache, nursing a cup of coffee.

She's been having headaches for a while now. She's a careful girl and knows that all sorts of things can be wrong with a headache, so she's already been to the doctor's. He took scans and everything and she's just waiting for the results. He said he'd call, and she's expecting the results any day now...

Her phone rings.

xxx

Sherlock comes in much later that afternoon. He's giddy with excitement, and _this_ much closer to figuring everything out (Molly can tell - she's seen it happen often enough).

She has never learned (though she has gotten shyer, ever since Jim). She asks him, while he waits for the spectrophotometer readings, if he'd like coffee when he's done.

He waves her away, and it is unfair that the dismissive gesture looks so fascinating when performed with his elegant hands (of course he isn't wearing the latex lab gloves). He has no patience today, not that he ever has patience.

"Molly, if I wanted coffee or any other inane beverage, I'd ask," he snaps. "I don't need you hovering at my elbow in a perpetual state of nervous ineptitude whenever I'm in the lab."

He doesn't even look at her when he says it. His head just lifts briefly, and then he goes back to furiously typing on his Blackberry.

She stands in shocked silence for a few moments. She knows how horrible he can be, and how he is not above using guile to get what he wants, and how he disregards everything she has ever done for him. And Molly Hooper decides that she will not take it lying down anymore.

Sherlock," she says. It's too soft; he doesn't even look up.

"_Sherlock._" Molly repeats herself, and while her voice is only slightly louder, there is a fierceness, a wildness in her tone that makes all the difference. She thinks that she is getting angry, and she really _just does not care_. "I'm good at what I do, Sherlock. And I work in this lab. I _know_ how every piece of equipment works, I know _exactly_ how to use every chemical we have in stock - I've ordered most of them myself - I _know_ what reaction you're hoping to achieve there, and I will not be treated as a, a stupid, ignorant..._idiot_ in my own lab. _My _lab, Sherlock. My flipping lab. And I can take that you ignore me, and that you use me, and that you're only ever _nice_ when you need something from me, even if you know, I'm sure you _know_, because how can you not _know_, that I've been in love with you for as long as I've known you, even when I was with Jim, but I will not, _will not_ let you call me incompetent, you - you bastard!"

She has his attention now. He's turned on the lab stool, and while he does look surprised, it's a cool sort of surprise, the slight raising of his eyebrows a look you'd see on someone whose dumb dog had started doing something unusually clever.

"I am _not_ incompetent. I am anything _but_ incompetent. You have no right to tell me that, I work so _hard_ to get everything right, and I may not think like you or, or _deduce_" - the word drips venom, and that surprises even Molly, because she's always admired his deductions - "like you do, and do you know how hard it is to work so hard, to try so hard to please, and then you come in and take everything for granted! You don't even see me, do you? I'm just access to so many body parts!"

"Molly -"

"Don't you 'Molly' me, you horrible man! You can't even be kind, can you? You just had to tell me Jim was gay, and you knew it would ruin everything, you just had to because you could! Well, aren't - you - _clever_?" Molly takes a deep breath. "You were wrong about him, though, weren't you? But at least he was _nice_ to me! Or he bothered to act nice, which is more than you have _ever_ done! And after all I do for you! _All that I fucking do_!"

The swearword surprises her. Molly Hooper does not swear. She has trouble saying 'damn.' But the word rolled right off her tongue, and Sherlock finally looks like he is genuinely in shock, and it feels _good_.

"So fuck you, Sherlock Holmes." She says it again. She actually says it again. "Fuck you, and fuck your case, and fuck your intellect, because if you really were so smart you'd have noticed that my head's aching like it's going to split down the middle, and the doctor says there's something there, some clot sitting right there, and they don't know if they can make it better yet, I have to go back for more tests, and if you had any proper human feeling, you'd at least _try_ to be nice, because of everything I've done for you, do you know how many times I've had to stick up for you when the administration complains, and I'm just _thirty-one_ and I have wasted so much _time_ being hung up over you and hoping you'd notice, and I don't want to _die_!"

The last bit comes out in a little wail, and Molly realizes that she's said more than she meant to, all she wanted was to give Sherlock the tongue-lashing of his life and then flounce out of the room in a dignified huff. It's impossible now. She has actually started to cry.

The room blurs through her tears. All she wants to do now is lock herself in the ladies' room for a good, long cry. She hates being angry, because she loses control, and wouldn't it just have to be Sherlock who makes her do that.

"Damn your impossible eyes," she says, her voice soft again, and the words catch and tumble in her throat, on her tongue as she tries not to sob.

Molly turns to leave, her shoulders shaking. The last thing, the absolute last thing, she expects is for Sherlock to leave his seat and reach for her wrist. She faces him, knowing how her face scrunches up when she cries, how her eyes go all puffy, and she sees beyond his shoulder (not over it, because he is that much taller than her) that his results are on the computer screen already, all the little numbers in their neat little rows. He isn't paying attention to them, though - and he must have seen them, or at least know that they're up already, he knows how long the machine takes to read a sample - and those impossible eyes of his are studying her face. Molly's never been on the receiving end of one of those looks of his before, and it makes her stomach flutter a little, even through her anger, even through her tears and stark, raving terror, because the look is so concentrated, so intense that she is sure, if only for that instant, that she is the only thing in Sherlock's world.

The thought makes her burst into tears, embarrassing, hiccupping, _loud_ sobs that she cannot stop any more than she could stop a hurricane.

Sherlock lets go of her wrist. He lets go of her wrist, but he catches her before she can run away, his long arms enveloping Molly in a warm, comforting hug. This makes her cry more than ever, and her tears leave wet marks on his white silk shirt and his impeccably cut jacket, but he holds her nonetheless, not saying anything, not even making quiet shushing noises, just holding her, and that is exactly what she needs.

Molly doesn't know how long they stand like that, with her weeping helplessly against his chest, and him eventually not so much hugging her as holding her upright. But he doesn't let go until she stops.

He actually doesn't let go until she tries to move away, suddenly very much aware of herself and embarrassed. Molly tries to stammer an apology, an explanation, an expression of gratitude, but Sherlock has already turned back to the computer.

"Coffee would be nice, actually," he says, and if his voice isn't any more gentle than it usually is, well, Molly wasn't expecting it to be any different. "Black-"

"Black with two sugars. I know."

"Thank you, Molly."


End file.
